I am lucky. I grew up in the 1980s and 90s, where our free time was spent playing outdoors, taking up a sport like swimming or tennis, reading and not having our mistakes and general teenage stupidities recorded on a camera phone for the whole world to see.
For today’s kids, life is much more complicated and its all online. Technology has been a terrific innovation for children and for learning but the dark side of social media, the pressures to look a certain way, body image issues, cyberbullying, paedophiles and other bad guys in cyber space -- all of this make it a very scary world for today’s teens.
Sure we had fashion magazines that glamorised anorexia and wafer thin bodies but today, kids are subjected to relentless images of what is considered “perfection” on social media. It has become far easier for predators to find targets.
Which is why the Australian government’s decision to ban social media for children under 16 has my support. My only worry: how will it be implemented?
Keeping people connected
The move has sparked off a huge debate around the world. Once implemented next year, the ban will prohibit kids under 16 from accessing platforms like Facebook, X, and TikTok. While it isn’t quite clear how this will work yet, the Australian Prime Minister has essentially laid the onus on social media platforms to take steps to ensure no access to children.
Again, the devil lies in the details. How will social media platforms verify the age of users? Right now it is easy to bypass any rules and register as an adult on a site like Instagram. One idea Australia has been debating is requiring details like government issued ID cards or facial recognition technology. But that has huge privacy issues that need to be addressed.
Many people are against this ban. They say in an age where our lives are closely linked to the internet, it is unrealistic to ban children from social media sites. They also point out that during the pandemic, it was social media that played a positive role in keeping people connected.
Danger zone for young women
And while all of that may be true, one has to ask whether the benefits of unbridled social media use outweigh the negatives for children today. Just look at the challenges kids are dealing with. Mental health is one such issue. Children often find their self worth measured online by the numbers of “likes” on their posts.
A few years ago, Facebook’s own internal research showed that Instagram was harming teenage girls through body image issues and unrealistic expectations about how they looked. Multiple studies have shown that children who spend several hours a day on social media are twice as likely to experience mental health issues like depression and anxiety. Children are especially vulnerable since their brains are still developing.
In an ideal world, parents should have been able to limit their children’s’ use of social media, with a self imposed ban on scrolling at bed time and just keeping it down to an hour a day. But it isn’t practical to expect that to happen. Which is why a legal ban may be the only way. It is how it is implemented that will matter more, and that may be the biggest challenge for Australia and any other government that follows suit.
